tone

English 8 students began a second story in which we look at irony, tone, and mood: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” We began by looking at all the items that establish the setting (circled in red) and the mood (underlined in blue).

English I Honors began Romeo and Juliet, focusing on the prologue.

Homework

English 8 Studies: none.

English I Honors: students who have not yet turned in their poetry test need to do so by tomorrow morning.

English 8 students began reviewing some of the thinking behind the vocabulary in the Article of the Week.

Afterward, we finished up tone in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and worked on mood.

English I students finished up the last sonnet (130), determining what the couplet brought to the poem.

Finally, English I students had a practice session for tomorrow’s essay test on poetry.

We’ll be having our culminating test tomorrow, though students today received the questions:

Identify tone and tonal shift of each poem. Make sure you quote specific passages of each poem in order to provide evidence.

What is the lyric moment of each poem? What epiphany does the speaker have in each poem?

Compare and contrast the two poems. How are the topics, tones, and lyric moments similar? How are they different?

The author of these poems was an early writer of what’s called “confessional poetry,” in which the “I” in the poem is very often the poet himself/herself. It involves writing not about what’s going on in the world but what’s going on in the heart and mind of the poet. What can you infer about the author if we assume that the “I” in each poem is the poet himself?

Students will receive the two poems tomorrow and have the period to answer those four questions.

Homework

English 8 Studies: none.

English I Honors: to prepare for the test (if you want extra practice), go to poets.org and choose two poems with the same theme (look for the “Theme” menu on the right) and work to answer the questions above for those two poems. (Bear in mind that it might not always work: the poems I’ve chosen for the test work perfectly for these questions, but not all poems about the same theme will work.)

Today in class we read “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”.We went over the tone of the poem and discussed what the poem was about.We learned that this poem was a Tonal Shift poem which is a poem that shifts its tone at a certain time in a poem.And also that is was a Lyric Moment which we will find out tomorrow in class

English 8 Strategies students had a discussion in the form of a Socratic seminar about topics related to our final project for the quarter, analytic paragraphs about the selections they are reading in literature class.

For Flowers for Algernon, discussion questions were:

Our relationships with other people are more important than our achievements.

It is better to accept your fate than to try to change it. (“Fate” means destiny.)

It is important to have empathy for others. (“Empathy” means more than sympathy: it means not just feeling sorry for someone but feeling the same thing with someone.)

English I Honors began a couple of days working with tone in writing, specifically in poetry. We began by saying the same sentence in various tones of voice in order to see what “tone” means in terms of voice.

Today in first and fourth periods we looked at tone again and evaluated some more of Billy Collins’ poems. We mostly looked at “The Lanyard” because of the tone change.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

We also watched Collins read a revised version of the play.

Second and seventh period, focusing on standard RL5: “Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style.”

We compared the text in Anne’s originally published diary with what appears in the play:

Homework

English 8 Strategies: Complete the comparison/contrast work from class as needed.

English I Honors: Look at the poems we’ve already read and try to find lyric moment (usually the place where the tone changes) on at least four of them.

Today in first and fourth periods we worked on identifying clues that tell us that “To Kill a Mockingbird” is written in a Southern voice. We looked at style attributes and content issues that indicate a Southern style.

Style Issues

Topical Issues

Long sentences

Diversions

Dated language

Folksy-sounding language

Exaggeration/embellishment

Understatement/deprecation

Importance of family,

Sense of community,

Importance of religion,

Importance of time, place, and the past

Second and seventh periods went through another Socratic Seminar, working out the mystery of Amy LaTour’s death.

We will return to Nightjohn tomorrow.

Homework

English 8 Strategies: none.

English I Honors:

Identify the clues (at least one of each) in the second half of the handout from today (see notes).